Mead Rabbit Hole - Rough Draft
The Mead Rabbit Hole
Welcome.
We are all a little mad here.
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What is mead?
To Some:
It is the divine nectar of immortality.
To Some:
The ideal of which beer, wine, cider and spirits are but cheap imitations.
When done well, it can be the “evanescent” drink of monks and poets, wizards and elves, witches and wisemen.
Gods and Goddesses.
A libation for celebration,
sanctification,
joyful recreation.
It is the end product of the cosmic synthesis
Of sunshine,
flowering plants,
social bees,
zymurgist microbes,
human work
and creativity.
It is thousands of flower visits
In one
sip.
The inebriant of our hunter gatherer ancestors with archeological records across 5 continents dating back at least 9000 years.
At its most straightforward:
Mead is the alcohol you get when you ferment honey.
It is the world and its history, the heavens and the earth all in a glass.
How deep does this rabbit hole go?
That is up to you.
Let us start with type:
Do you like it sweet or dry? Tart maybe? Somewhere in between?
You may have to start thinking three dimensionally.
High Alcohol or Low?
Warming? Cooling?
Rich or Refreshing?
There is no limit to where we can go.
Really, the laws of physics and logic are suspended in mead space at a certain point.
But I’ll get to that.
With four and five dimensions even.
A tesseract of mead.
A penteract even.
You may need a compass.
If I gave you mine, you would probably end up somewhere I like to spend time.
It is warm where I sit. 70 something. 80 maybe. And sunny.
I like bubbles. Tart. Almost Rich.
Perfect for a west coast switch.
A change from doing
To deeply beeing.
An experience
Mentally
Quite freeing.
But your journey is your own, and if I gave everyone my compass, it might get crowded here.
And the correspondence monotonous.
I would rather that you built your own compass and ship and that we discussed and argued
Joyfully
Over why we navigate the way we do and what it means.
Meads
Traditional - honey, water yeast.
That’s all it takes to make this beast.
A beast that Odin slayed,
and sang
the song of inspiration
Divine:
“A Drink I took of the Magic Mead
And I began to know and to be wise,
To grow and to weave poems.”
Arjuna, Indra,
Israeli Priest
Had this nectar at their feast.
Methleglin -
A mead with herbs and spices added in.
The old mead wives -
witches were
With staff hung high in kitchen ther’
They stirred the brew and added in,
flowers, leaves,
And root bark dew
To cure
with nature
what ailed you.
Some church men called it weird and dark
(They couldn’t reliably arrest the spark)
But Shakespear, Chaucer,
Bro Adam too,
They wrote and crafted and drank the brew.
What is mead to you?
A song you heard, once long ago?
A quiet stirring in your soul?
Of light made liquid, here on earth
To drink and share
In health and mirth?
There’s melomels
With fruit and mel
Of them I’ll ask other Mazers tell.
I like my mead straightforward, see.
(with pieces of flower, root and tree)
The braggots too.
Not my bag.
Braggdalf though was not half bad.
I have seen a lot, and you will too…
Though there is so much left
for us to do.
Varietals from Asian Cliff,
The rainforest, Amazon, on skiff.
Organic.
Regen.
One Season’s flows.
A time snap made drinkable.
Heck, a dry day drinker with layers of flavor,
Would do the trick when we are able.
There are recipes from Midas’ Tomb,
Pharos’, Queens’, Ploughmen too.
We can rediscover, re create.
See how and what, they celebrate
In the eternal afterglow.
Where time is nothing,
Each breath, slow.
We talk of 4 dimensions, five.
With mead in us it comes alive.
The musings of the physicist
the mysticist,
And pandeist
Who feel the vibrations in their soul
Of what cannot be seen
Above
Below
A flatlander’s 12-D paradise
The mind can hold it all you see
When stillness comes
And honeybee.
To keep gentle,
calm and present
To smell and taste
each intention meant
The buzz, the laugh
Not too loud
Their singing make the Great Love proud.
But let us get down to brass tacks.
Mead is no mere artifact.
Of hist’ry, science, mythology,
Magic, craft and poetry.
Hundreds, thousands, make the brew.
They drink and share so you can too.
What will your favorite flavor be?
Depends,
Get started,
Follow me.